Vacuum Tube Manufacturing

[Jazz P Bass]

Mullard archive video:YouTube - ‪Mullard - Blackburn Vacuum Tubes Factory (Part 2)‬‏
RCA Video: YouTube - ‪Electrons on Parade pt 1 - RCA‬‏
This guy rolls his own!:Make: Online | Make your own vacuum tubes?

[Jag]

Watched the Mullard one, gotta watch the others later. That's cool, thanks for posting!

[Jazz P Bass]

You have to watch the one where the guy makes his own triodes!

[Mars Amp Repair]

man, did you catch the gals being called 'inspectrices' !! I think that would have a completely different meaning these days ;-] . All that silliness aside can you imagine doing all that tedious work hour after hour day after day week after week month after month....I'd go nutz in 2 hours of that work.

the closest thing I ever did like that was as a 13yr old teenager I worked for a mob run 'Compac cassette' factory in Rockaway, N.J. I started out breaking apart defective cassettes, putting the tape here & the head pad over there & throwing out the outer case. then I graduated to making the head pads that went behind the tape in the eight track tapes. the ones that were made of gray foam with clear tape over them. That's were I learned about living for your breaks & what watching the clock was all about.

I then graduated to building the solid state amplifiers that detected the signal to tell the 8 track winding machines to stop & allow the eight track 'windress' (i guess) to cut the tape & splice it & then start to load the next cartridge. You might recall when the tape was about to get to the end of the track, they would fade out the song and you would hear this really low frequency 'Plop- plop- plop' and then the track would change. that was probably about 1khz at the high winding speed.

It was pretty funny when the machine for some reason or other would not detect the signal & over load the cartridge. tape would be flying everywhere & the mostly Puerto Rican gals would start screaming in Spanish to trigger one of us to go over & stop the machine.

geeze I'm starting to sound like my grandpa with all the old stories...I guess 8 tracks & tubes are the equivalent of the horse, buggy and trolley stories he told...HAH! glen

[Chuck H]

I did watch the one where the guy makes his own tubes. I'd do the same if I had all those very cool tools. Sort of like making your own caps though. It CAN be done, and it's geeky and fun, but the end result is likely less consistent and of lower quality than what you can simply buy.

[Jazz P Bass]

The man is most certainly set up for the operations required.